My father shot himself.
The death-varsaries are challenging. Only in the last few years have they become somewhat more manageable. It has taken many years. One year, several years ago, I drank so much wine, it came erupting out of me, the only thing more violent were my sobs, my body wracked with uncontrollable weeping.
I make better choices now. I write through the grief.
I was reflecting on this journey today, of these death-varsaries, while in conversation with a new but dear friend who is also undergoing her own grieving and healing journey with the death of a partner.
We spent time together today, a request of mine, as I wanted fun and a distraction, not to be alone too much with my thoughts of him and the gravity of the day’s significance.
I think of my father often this time of year. But especially this year, my first fall in the north again after many years. Southern falls are different, the air doesn’t have the crispness, the leaves the same crunch.
But this time of the autumn, when the trees are barren, the foliage, already gone. This time of the year where the trees look like bony skeletons and the devoid of any greenness, any life, this time of the year is permanently etched into my mind—the season my dad killed himself.
I remember arriving back in southwestern NY state, from Ohio. The coolness of the evening air, the smell of those crunchy dead maple leaves underfoot.
I remember the resistance of the heavy door leading into my parents’ house, with past dog’s paw prints deeply engraved into the wood. I remember the smell of entering into the doorway, the earthy musty moist smell of the cellar where my mother stored her homemade dilly beans.
I remember entering into the living room and my mother sitting looking in stance, her figure hazy through swirls of smoke, the ashtray full of cigarettes, evidence of her chain smoking since she arrived home, got the news.
I was scared to look into the living room, but even in my peripheral vision I recognized the missing piece of furniture, my father’s couch, which functioned as both his bed and chair, gone.
The otherwise crowded home, densely packed with junk in heavy piles, due to my mother’s hoarding, looked suddenly vacant and empty. The absence of that couch felt.
I could not remember a time when that couch had not been there. As the center of our living room. My father, the center of the family. Centered because of his age, his alcoholism, his egocentrism and volatile behavior when drunk, he had always been there, center stage, sitting on his couch.
On that couch he cursed the Buffalo Bills and failed plays and passes of Jim Kelly, there he sat and watched John Wayne and Sylvester Stallone movies until we all could recite them word for word. On that couch he watched Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy, religiously, every weekday night.
We all sat and gathered around that couch and coffee table playing hours upon four-handed cribbage as a family. I brought many grilled steak dinners in the summer and ate on that couch, him at one end and me at the other table, once the kitchen table got too overstacked with heavy piles of miscellaneous objects.
That couch was one of the few places guests could find a place to sit, when they visited and chatted, a place that wasn’t overburdened by piles of random objects that haunted nearly other surface of the home. Usually guests only had to sit on a few rogue of his clothing from the piles at the end. That couch is where we could receive guests doubling also as his dresser.
Now though, it was gone, removed because it had blood smatters deeply entrenched in the fabric, loosened springs; bits of his flesh and pieces of brain matter, after he shot himself. Little tufts of white hair, pure white, just like my grandmother’s would float like dust bunnies around the living room still, for many days to come.
I stood there taking in the vacancy of the room, the couch’s absence. It was gone, as was my father.
I urged my mother to get up, to leave. Child-like, she followed my lead, grateful to be taken by the hand and led out of there. I walked down the stairs, pushed hard at the door, it resisted, then gave way and together we walked out into a dark, cold night. Away from the couchless living room.